Will Beattie's Blog

  Hosting your applications in the cloud yields many benefits, however it can be at times a very scary place when thing’s go wrong, and they always do. If you love your customers then you owe it to them to make sure you have in place redundancy and ensure you provide a high level of availability. The Amazon EC2 Infrastructure provides a really easy way to set this up using the Elastic Load Balancing feature. Before starting you need the basic concepts of how the EC2 infrastructure works and how it can help you in your quest for high availability. Regions Regions in EC2 are geographical locations where the Data Centres reside and at the time of writing there are four Regions: US East – North Virginia US West – California EU – Ireland APAC – Singapore It goes without saying that the Region you select should be always be as close to your customers as possible. Availability Zones Each Region has 2 or more Availability Zones. These are importan...

The very first thing I do when building an Amazon EC2 image is too disable the Shut Down button. Shutting Down an instance has the same effect of terminating the instance, meaning you lose all data not stored on EBS volumes. Click Start > Run > Type “gpedit.msc” and press enter Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Toolbar The option you are looking for is “Remove and prevent access to the Shut Down, Restart, Sleep, and Hibernate commands” Right Click > Properties > Select Enabled > Click Apply > Click OK Now when you go to the Start Menu you will see this with the only options being Lock and Log Off. Now you can use the AWS Management Console to manage reboots or terminations.